MMO's and other PC games are a particular interest of mine. One I spend all too much time doing. Iggep's Blog is where I'll be expressing my thoughts on the various games I play and the industry as a whole.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Love is in the air 2010

I’ve gotten out of the habit of blogging about the WoW world events, but the Love is in the Air world event is one that deserves additional comment after I criticized Blizzard last year for allowing what I believed to be a shoddy assortment of achievements and tasks to go forward for the world event as it did last year. This year Blizzard completely redesigned the world event, adding in an “event boss” to Shadowfang Keep, a quest chain, and removing the hourly need to seek out a guard in one of the major cities. Instead, the world event now has us collecting pieces off random creatures and creating charm bracelets that you turn into the faction bosses daily. Each bracelet gets you five love tokens (valentine cards) that you use as currency to purchase all the items you need for the various achievements. Except the flowers, which are drops off various bosses in dungeons.

All in all I am extremely pleased with the redesign. All RNG has been removed, except for the flowers, which you can “farm” for with a group of friends. Anyone over level 70 can simply run UK on normal mode and get the flowers off the Prince. Farming for the bracelet pieces doesn’t really qualify as farming, since you can get them off anything you kill doing daily quests, or off creatures and NPCs you kill in dungeon runs or even in raids. I’ve been running Ulduar 10 killing the dwarves at the beginning in a siege tank for most of mine. If you are patient, and do not wish to complete the entire world event in a day, there is no need to do that as you can already get 50 love tokens a day just turning in four bracelets and doing the daily quest. On the other hand, I had two characters I am doing the world event on and desired to get as much done as I can in the first couple days, so I have been doing the daily turn-ins/quests as well as using my extra bracelets to acquire extra love tokens. The event lasts two weeks, so there really isn’t a reason to do it that way other than impatience.

The new “event boss” is actually a trio of bosses that you need to kill inside Shadowfang Keep. Any decently geared group can simply burst them down, but using the inoculation potions that you are given at the outset makes the fight much easier. Especially on the healer. If you are melee, just make sure you are always at the current bosses back, and stay out of the poison. If you are ranged, all you need to do is remain apart of the scrum and stay out of the poison. As with all other event bosses, each individual in the group can summon them once per day, and they drop loot. In this case, they drop ilevel 226 neck pieces, a pet oozeling, and a couple other novelty pieces.